Contents

Personal

My brother borrowed this game from a friend shortly after it was released and I played it on my family's 386SX Packard Bell. I was really blown away by this game. It looked far more impressive than any game I had seen before. I was even more impressed when I played it with my Sound Blaster, which not only added music, but a small amount of digital audio, including speech.

As a child, I didn't get very far into to game because I was too creeped out by the Screamer monsters to venture very far past Baywatch. Instead, I tried recording the stats of every item I got in the game. I had a stack of papers and never realized that I only needed to record each individual prefix and suffix! After discovering that Fountain Head had a place where you could work odd jobs for a week to earn gold, and that the bank earned you interest over time, I spent hours making my characters work over an over again. I ended up with millions in the bank, but all my characters ended up dying of old age! I tried a couple other times to beat the game, but I keep getting bored with it. I think I've finished about 1/3 of it.

Status

I own the game for MS-DOS in a Might & Magic collection. I have not beaten it.

Reviews

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

The graphics and animations are unbelievably good for a game from 1991. The pixel art is fantastic, and the designers incorporated a lot of photographs seamlessly into the game. Truly state of the art.

The combat system is simple enough to not be an obstacle, but complex enough to handle different tactics. I like how attacks give a general idea of damage by changing the size of the blood splatter without resorting to numbers.

The prefix/suffix system for items was a great way of creating nearly countless variations of items.

Although the UI nicely allows mouse control for everything, it still has full keyboard shortcuts to make things much faster.

The mugshots are drawn very well, and how they change to indicate status ailments was a great idea.

Bad

The music and sound is pretty bland.

The dungeon traps are pretty obnoxious. Even though they're clearly visible, they're often unavoidable and only serve to slowly weaken your party.

Several of the enemies are drawn as puns or jokes, and they ruin the game's feel.

In-game map sections are pretty small, and enemies are not rendered until you enter the section which often causes unrealistic ambushes.

The overworld game map is extremely artificial and blocky.

Although you don't -have- to rely on the temple blessings and well power-ups, you'd be crazy not to, but this creates annoying busy work every day.

I don't think the sci-fi aspect was well integrated. This is always tricky to do, and I think the designers failed.

Ugly

The original release had a pretty bad game-breaking bug that made it nearly impossible to win.

Media

Cover Art

I don't really like any of the boxes used for the game.

This box art was used for all regions for PC releases. The frizzy-haired gaunt pirate is more laughable than intimidating, but the scenery is pretty good.

The Japanese PC-98 release simply puts a logo over the game map art. Great lettering on it.

The Japanese Super CD-ROM System art uses an anime watercolor. The characters are overly sexualized, but well-painted.

The American SNES box has a pretty cool beast bursting through a door on some adventurers. It's well-painted by has nothing to do with the game.